Looks like we're not the only ones watching Mad Men. 2.8 million watched the premiere, up 33% from last season's debut of 2 million viewers. Can Don Draper hold their interest?

If you still have last night's third season premiere of Mad Men sitting on your DVR, move on to something else. Or maybe you're not planning to watch. Either way, here are the plot points Matt Weiner put into play.

You can't swing a hepcat (you know, from the '60s!) without hitting a feature about Mad Men, then why aren't there many details about, you know, the actual show.

Someone needs to tell AMC that vampires are the host monster now, as they shell out big bucks for a zombie show. Natalie Portman also gets a TV deal. And Legos (yes, the toy) are coming to the big screen.

Some strange casting decisions plague us today, while others intrigue us. Also, MTV ponders a terrible idea, AMC picks up an interesting show, and everyone watched Jon & Kate Plus Hate.

Movie deals for funny men, a TV deal for a funny woman, AMC branches out, SAG and AFTRA become friends again, and The Simpsons make the mail.

Though AMC recently set an optimistic summer return date for the next season of Mad Men, show mastermind Matthew Weiner (whose contract dispute remains unresolved) has a much gloomier forecast, he tells E!

Good news for all the chain-smoking, emotionally inaccessible men and the girls who love 'em: AMC just announced a return date for the third season of Mad Men! There's just one problem.

For Mad Men's slender but loyal viewership, SNL's Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women sketch peeled back the hard, handsome mystery of the adultering marketing genius underneath. On tonight's season finale, Don's silent journey into the abyss best get some resolution. And if you haven't sampled the best show on television before, you now have another reason to.For the past two seasons, Jon Hamm's character has been on a journey to find himself, drinking profusely and cheating on his wife to soothe his aching psyche and add to his bone list. With a massive lack of onscreen dialogue in this season's L.A. Story arc, Don Draper has said less and done more than any character on TV, as SNL so aptly reminded us: While we remain fascinated by every single aspect of Don's life, audiences haven't been as kind to the silent giant of Sterling Cooper. Despite being the best show on television, Mad Men's ratings haven't appreciably improved: it attracts about 1.5 million viewers weekly compared to CSI's 19 million plus audience. Does Matthew Weiner's masterpiece have to be like The Wire where the larger viewing public doesn't really get it until the show is in its last throes? The preview video for tonight's finale of Mad Men joins a discussion between the junior copywriters of Sterling Cooper about what exactly their sexaholic mastermind boss is doing in Los Angeles. One speculates he's landing a big fish, another says he's done this before. Let's just be sure to wrap it up one way or another, Weiner. Click to view

No One Escapes the Emmys Unscathed: You might think that after becoming the first basic cable show to win the Emmy for Best Drama, AMC's Mad Men would receive a bump in ratings from first-timer curious to see what all the fuss is about. You would be wrong: the series fell from 1.9 million viewers to 1.6 million for its first episode since the awards ceremony. In the words of defiant Emmy figurehead Josh Groban, "Really? Really?!" [THR]

So Mad Men creator/EP/spiritual shepherd Matthew Weiner realizes he's sitting on something pretty special with his cast of desk-hopping, Brylcreemed creatives over at Sterling Cooper. Perhaps it was the 16 Emmy nominations that tipped him off. ("Don't think of them as Emmy awards," his inner Don Draper will intone on the big night, "Think of them as tiny angels, flapping their pointy wings to a place where fear doesn't live. They're saying, 'You are OK, Matt...It's all...OK.'") Weiner's contract with the show's studio, Lionsgate TV, is up at the end of this season, and Variety reports he's been shopping himself around town to the highest bidder:

For the 987 readers (whoops — make that 988 and counting since starting this sentence) following "Don Draper"'s Twitter feed, today was an unusually turbulent day at Sterling Cooper Ad Agency. Same thing for the 1,207 folks following "Peggy Olson." You might have been among them, frozen out when AMC reportedly turned to Twitter with complaints about the Mad Men characters posting regular "updates" on the service — discussions which, for whatever reason, resulted in Twitter admin suspending a handful of feeds today until the a fan and media backlash supposedly helped whip them back into place a few hours later. And while at least one AMC critic accused the network of history's "single worst use (misuse?) of social media," other observers seemed baffled that AMC would endanger free advertising. AMC insists that wasn't its plan, and we believe it: If a brief outage could virally promote Mad Men's unofficially official Twitter sites for most of the morning — to the tune of a few hundred new followers in the middle of the series' worst ratings slump — we would have done the same thing ourselves.Sure it's cynical, but hey — Twitter's founders will tell you themselves they "spend more money than [they] make," and a viral scandal seems a reasonably healthy win-win: AMC takes some geek heat in a slow news week. Twitter gets play for its viral-marketing value and influence. Don, Peggy, Bert Cooper and co. get to take the morning off. Mad Men rebounds after Labor Day — new episodes, Twitter feeds, DVD sets and all. The worst part? AMC can never admit brilliantly framing itself in a week when no one is following any news that's not coming out of Denver. Anyway, call us contrarians, but we applaud everyone involved. Especially the 25 people who've grabbed Don Draper's feed in the time it's taken to write this item. Someone's got good taste.

Fans of AMC's 1960s period drama "Mad Men," have created a series of Twitter accounts impersonating characters from the show's ad agency. Better check them out now: AMC lawyers have already filed legal notices with Twitter demanding their removal. Don Draper and Joan Halloway's accounts are already gone. Obviously, that's a mistake on the part of the cable channel.Star Wars creator George Lucas may not know how to make a movie anymore, but he at least he knows letting Star Wars fans live out weird fantasies by writing fan fiction and posting it on the Web will only help sell more merchandise in the end. "Mad Men" is a hit on both coasts — some say it's retro costumes are starting to impact men's fashion — it's not a Star Wars-sized hit at all and really can't afford to thumb its nose at fans willing to waste their time promoting the show. Here are some of fans' more successful Twitter impersonations below.

Another day, another windfall of remakes, updates and adaptations requiring attention on our End of Ideas scorecard. It could be worse, we suppose, than Natalie Portman allegedly signing on for a graphic horror re-do, or yet another movie-to-TV serialization that could possibly make Dennis Hopper's own new show a folly in comparison. Even staffers at the LA Times are getting in on the recycling act today. It's never been hotter! But we're not here to cast aspersions, we're just here to handicap. As such, read on for your irregularly occurring guide to the latest in retreads — and their varying chances for winning us over.THE TITLE: Suspiria THE ORIGINAL: Dario Argento's 1977 giallo classic planted nubile Jessica Harper in the middle of a ballet academy-cum-witch's coven. Vivid, over-the-top bloodshed ensues. THE REMAKE: Having long expressed interest in a remake, David Gordon Green is reportedly set to follow Pineapple Express with Suspiria — featuring Natalie Portman as his lead. She would produce as well. APPEAL: Strong. Face it — for all its inspired demises and influence, Argento's original doesn't age well. It's saturated from eye to ear with genre cheese that could benefit from a modern reimagining with real cinematography (by Green's brilliant regular lenser Tim Orr, we presume) and a less-manufactured sense of peril. Only downside: Can it compete with the horror of Portman's real-life love interest? THE TITLE: The Conversation THE ORIGINAL: Between the first two Godfather films, Francis Ford Coppola knocked out this extraordinary drama about a surveillance expert (Gene Hackman) paranoiacally ensnared in a murder plot. THE REMAKE: Oscar-winning Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie is on board an AMC TV series with producer Tom Krantz, who has been trying to develop the show for a decade. APPEAL: Zero. Krantz tells Variety that "[t]he issues of privacy and individuality, and issues of spying and listening, are as relevant now as they've ever been. This is the perfect vehicle to tell those stories." Exactly — which is why you broadcast the timeless original on AMC as opposed to embarrass yourself attempting to keep up. Coppola is behind it, though; there's only so much wine he can sell, evidently, to subsidize his nonsense. THE TITLE: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! THE ORIGINAL: Russ Meyer's 1965 saga set the enduring standard for busty-stripper murder rampages. THE REMAKE: Quentin Tarantino, who already did sex-kitten speed-demonry in Death Proof, wants you to pay for a variation on himself and Meyer. Starring Britney Spears. Sigh. APPEAL:: Sigh. It's a little easier to swallow once you remember how well the guy's always done without ever conceiving an original idea. But is this really news, or is he just hedging lest Inglorious Bastards' hype proves unsustainable? After all, the Spears/Mendes/Kardashian rumor mill has been churning since January. This whole mess screams, "Just in case." That said, we've heard worse. (See The Conversation) THE TITLE: "French thriller Tell No One a word-of-mouth hit" THE ORIGINAL: An Aug. 1 enterprise story by Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter, spotlighting what has become the art-house sleeper hit of summer. THE REMAKE: An Aug. 7 enterprise story by John Horn of the LA Times, spotlighting what has become the art-house sleeper hit of summer. APPEAL:: Flatlining. Happy as we are to see Tell No One's out-of-the-blue indie traction, Horn's second head-slapper in as many days has us fearing he may need more direct supervision at the Times. At least yesterday's baseless piece "Wednesday is the new Friday in movie releases" was an original. Try harder, John — your paper needs you.

Ask Don: Confused? Conflicted? Lingering regrets? Maybe everyone's favorite Madison Ave. iceberg—10% cool exterior, the other 90% lurking beneath the surface—can help you at What Would Don Draper Do: "Dear Don Draper, I was thinking about getting the 3G iPhone. Thoughts?: Stop thinking about it as a phone with a touch screen. Start thinking about it as a way to touch each other." [What Would Don Draper Do?]

After last week's harrowing episode of The Two Coreys, in which fallen teen angel Corey Haim was led to the Defamer comments section like a sacrificial, desperately-seeking-series-regular-work lamb, we stumbled upon a comment of interest. (Yes, this was a commenter commenting upon a clip of Haim reading our comments: sort of the post-cultural equivalent of staring into one of those fabulous '70s infinity mirrors.)

"On Sunday, June 29," the web-blurb legend goes, "Shootout aired a 'Best of' episode on Summer Blockbusters. Guests Jon Favreau, Michael Bay, and Brett Ratner shared their experiences working on major summer spectaculars." And so it was written, and so it should come to pass, that through the magic of repackaging, three of Hollywood's most venerated fauxteurs should share reminiscences and insights with Variety's Peter Bart and Peter Guber. Highlighted above, an exchange with Transformers director and unwitting spondylitis spokesperson, Michael Bay: Acknowledging Bart's observation that he was born into box-office brothels, Bay goes on to pay loving tribute to shlock-piloting cicerones Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. (Note their imposing, circa-Days of Thunder publicity-shot in high-contrast B&W.) Without them, not a single extraneous helicopter explosion or lingering shot of Megan Fox's ass-crack would ever have been possible.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner wrote the pilot episode of his show about 1960s advertising execs way back in 1999, only to have it rejected by pretty much every cable outfit in the world. But now that it's a gigantic, critic-worshipped hit on AMC, he's not about to let anyone muck it up. "Matthew Weiner stood on the set of his hit show, 'Mad Men,' ready for his close-up in extreme anxiety. He was watching the rehearsal of a scene that seemed fine to me, better than fine, but his staccato commentary was a scene in itself. 'He should be standing,' he said of an actor who was seated. 'That should be on the table,' he said of an accordion folder that an actress had placed on the floor. 'They're overreacting, paying too much attention to each other.' He heard himself and looked slightly sheepish. 'You'll see it turn from theater to movie in the next take,' he told me. "I want them not to pay too much attention to each other, so it feels real, more perfunctory. Not that TV thing.' His smile was wry. 'I'm very impatient.'"

Apparently, people have seen and enjoyed Breaking Bad, AMC's newly-minted series, continuing both the network's flare for both drama and alliteration. Mad Men, AMC's other show, won two awards at the recent Golden Globes press conference. We are vaguely concerned that AMC might lose touch with its roots and deprive us of back to back late-night runs of Batman, but at least with a second hit it won't be too long before general manager Charlie Collier can start paying his employees. [Broadcasting & Cable]

NBC Universal Integrated Media president Beth Comstock explains to the attendees of the 2007 American Magazine Conference in lovely Boca Raton that modern media consumers are all either fat losers embarrassing themselves before the nation in the comfort of their living rooms or underaged MySpace camwhores.